


Bezoar For Touching

by kayliemalinza



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M, Temporary Character Death - Jack Harkness, ambiguous ending, dodgy aliens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-16
Updated: 2008-10-16
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:10:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a Jell-O monster eating everything; Ianto ruminates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bezoar For Touching

They don't know what year it is. They followed train tracks to a closed-up station because they need four walls, a ceiling, and a floor. They need the organic molecules of wood and inorganic steel. The thing they're running from eats both but not together.

Gwen is safe with polyester-cotton blend and Ianto's tie is acetate. Jack wears natural fibers and his boots have rubber soles. He ran and fought and then his body rippled green inside translucent guts. The creature burped.

"The Rift," screamed Gwen. "The _Rift!_ "

"It's trying to get away," said Ianto, and they leapt into the crackle-morass of a wound in time and space.

"You should have stayed behind," Jack hissed later, sluicing the sludge from his coat. "I can always take the long road back to you."

"And miss seeing you get crapped out an alien's ass?" said Gwen. "No chance in hell."

"We should go," said Ianto. "It's starting to wake up."

They found the tracks and ran. The station's full of dust and damp, and the signs are all in Spanish. Gwen is opening the lockers with a paper clip and when that fails, a knife.

Jack doesn't smell as bad as they think he should, and dries off pretty quickly. He's dying.

"I must have swallowed some of its stomach acids," he rasps. "Enzymes... digesting me from the inside. Doesn't hurt, though," he grins.

Jack says all he needs is time and they've got lots of it to spare. Gwen's found a magazine from 1936, discoloured but not rotted.

"Always did like the forties," says Jack, and lays down beneath a bench to take a nap. To slip into a coma.

o

Gwen is reading the magazine and making fun of thirties' fashions. It's been three hours, as near as they can tell. Ianto's watch is broken and Jack's strap is wedged beside his chest, unreachable.

Ianto sits above Jack on the bench and presses his heels against Jack's side. Jack is not conscious and thus is not conscious of what Ianto's feet are doing, but Ianto feels less guilty, feels he is not so incompatible with Jack. Jack likes to touch at whim but Ianto likes a warning. "I am going to put my hand on your wrist, right here, is that ok?" is not precisely what he means but Ianto is not a woman with her arms around her boyfriend in the park and never will be.

Jack has not complained. He's waited until Ianto brushed his hand in setting down a mug. He said his name to let him know, said "Ianto" and slipped his thumb beneath the shirt cuff. He burned his finger's whorls and furrows into Ianto's pulse.

Ianto warms his ankles in the hollow of Jack's waist. He looks at Jack between the bench's slats and Jack is magic, stripe and shadow, half unseen. The wood is old and warm where Ianto slides his palm along the grain. He is not a statue; he has working bits in working places and his brain processes input from his nerves in human ways. Pressure and warmth are good; the pleasure of textures may vary. Ianto likes for Jack to press him to the wall with hands, hot chest, the insistent corner of a hip. He also likes electric moments of not touching, the tensile string linking his belly to Jack's grin, the way that Jack can make him restless.

Ianto draws up his feet and lays out on the bench. He's on top of Jack, but not.

Gwen looks up frowning from the magazine. "We should be doing something, shouldn't we?" she says.

Ianto shrugs. "We're luring it in."

Gwen checks the scanner and that's right. The creature is moving steadily toward the station. Last they saw, it was eating tufts of grass among the ties, scooping out thick troughs of dirt. Every so often it would pause and swipe its tongue along the metal tracks, and the morning sun would make its Jell-O belly glimmer.

o

The slate is falling off the roof. They listen to it peal and shatter on the ground. Jack bucks underneath the bench and Ianto scrambles off of it. He drags him out as Jack shudders, vomits, scrabbles with his hands for something he can't see and dies. Ianto wipes away the foam that's speckled in the corner of Jack's mouth.

The thing is pressed against the eastern windows, slurping shingles from the roof. It's nearly noon and the sun is beaming, tinting everything inside the station green. The monster's spine is spiraled and magenta. Gwen goes to the window and points to the monster's guts, its peristaltic shivers and a flock of roiling bezoars. "All the shingles are collecting over there," she says. "But this lump looks like it's made of grass."

"Very careful not to mix up organic and inorganic food," says Ianto. He muses innocently, "I wonder what would happen if they did mix?"

They stack up benches, cloister Jack behind them. Gwen is wearing sunglasses and the RAF coat backwards. She takes Jack's gun and waits for Ianto to join Jack behind the barricade, then puts the pistol barrel right up to the window. No chance to miss.

The window splatters glass and six small bullets, made of metal, lodge inside the grass and soil bezoar. Gwen and Ianto don't expect the foam that gushes in, pale blue with streaks of pink, and sizzles on the floor. Translucent skin is catching on the glass still in the frame, is crinkling on the window sill as the monster falters down. The foam is spreading fast.

Ianto can't completely carry Jack. Gwen is stumbling in the heavy coat and the benches buckle, legs and crossbeams eaten by the flood. The smell of it is scraping razors in their nostrils.

Jack sucks in a breath just as they make it out the door. He gets his feet and Ianto can move them faster through the scraggled grass, reach out a hand to Gwen. The monster is a steaming tarp that's clinging to but slipping off the roof. Gwen and Ianto can barely breathe; their faces clot and smear with blood. Killer nose-bleeds. Mucous tinged with blue.

"Dammit!" Jack yells. " _Dammit!_ " He's tall and dark against the sunlight, he's the stubborn press of fingers to the side of Ianto's face.

Give us a cuddle, luv, thinks Ianto, before his vision spins and prickles black.


End file.
